YOLO

It's 2021.08.01 on the lunar calendar today.

Hi, I hope you had a Labor Day weekend of some rest. Pictured are me and Cocoa enjoying a bucolic afternoon before a late night of poor Cocoa getting skunked and the chaos that ensued just before I had to drive back down to LA.

I'm happy to have had the chance to spend more time in the Bay with my sisters this summer. We recently went to the Oakland Museum of California and I squealed when we were greeted by the words of my pal Martine Syms at the afrofuturism exhibition—Martine in the wild! She wasn't even aware that

her manifesto

was quoted there. If you're in the area,

the exhibition

runs through February and I highly, highly recommend it. So inspiring.

Speaking of the Bay Area, the City of Fremont is taking donations to

provide direct assistance to Afghan refugees

. All that's going on in the world is enough to make one's head spin but taking small steps and local action—like voting no in the gubernatorial recall—is something I can do instead of withdrawing.

 I came across says it's funny that we have to keep going to our little jobs while the world is ending. It's been impossible to ignore that this axis of capitalism society spins around is just not working and I wonder what the future will hold ...  I can look as far forward as this Friday when I'll be playing with Brandon on guitar for the Fullerton College Concert Hour.

#YOLO

Give the people what they want. And the people want "The Girl from Ipanema."

The number of subscribers on YouTube rests at the number of the beast—will someone

, move my channel count away from those digits? 😅

Baden Powell's Deixa is a Brazilian song of YOLO dating back from well before the term was coined. The lyrics say You Only Live Once (literal translation: nobody lives more than once) and talks about leaving/letting go. My voice sounds too delicate in this range to carry the samba melody but I love the words and energy of the song and I knew the guys would kill it. What an example of how hard a band can groove with brushes!

Mila Dreams 

You may recall my friend Sun's animation to my song "Little Bird" that screened in the kids program at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival and elsewhere. Well, now the same character from the video can be found in print with the launch of the Mila Dreams store! I bought notebooks for all of my sisters—bears and honorary—and ordered some art prints too for little friends :) 

Music Academy

It was fun adjudicating the Digital Challenge for the Music Academy. There were a few entries that stood out including winner

Gaby's horn piece tracing the words of Ocean Vuong

, a vlog-like baritone performance of Debussy's "Chansons de Bilitis" that seemed to bring classical voice into this decade, and an unexpectedly moving concept of playing multiple curated YouTube videos at once to create new soundscapes (check it out at

everysound2021.com

), which sort of blew me away.

Currently reading Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do 📖Or rather, I finished it in a sitting (it's a quick read as a graphic novel) and it was so good and beautifully printed that I gave it to a friend the next day.